Posted by Guest Reviewer
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:43:00 GMT
[This is a guest review and interview by Fuzz.]
“I don’t remember my line…
Snow snowball dreams ghosts white ele (elegy) stripes…
Talk with eyeball in the bed…
Mental station…
I passionately like how helicopter flies under the eye nerve…
Undercarriage of the airplane, which looks like the blood vessels…
Am I not healthy?
On the aviation field planes fly away one by one…
This story of the broken equilibrium is about a guy, who was in the psychward, but once flew away…
My art does not suck…”
Space Spy is a puzzle game by Vasily Zotov, the creator of Quite Soulless. It is a series of 5 vignettes set in and around the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. What starts off with a seemingly innocuous shot of keys dropping into the sewers escalates into an adventure of epic scale featuring the hypnotization of police officers, 8-sided eyeballs in psychiatric wards, a romance between an actress and a yeti, and the destruction of a courtroom by a fascist with a rocket launcher. And all the while the crazy director Canavati is watching you…
The graphics can hardly be considered “good” by any stretch of the imagination, but they are fascinating in an eerie, surreal sort of way. An IGF judge described Zotov’s art style as “so amazingly complex and interesting that it’s almost ‘folk art’”. The models and backgrounds are obviously very amateur, but they have a certain charm and atmosphere to them which would just not be quite the same if they were more polished.
The gameplay primarily consists of puzzles involving various objects being pushed to certain coordinates on a grid. The solutions are often quite obscure, but the developer includes a walkthrough for each level within the game so there’s no need to fret about how to complete a particular section. The lack of sound and extremely slow movement were the only real barriers to my enjoyment of this wonderfully insane creation, but neither of those are major problems. Those who must consistently be absorbing sounds can just listen to their own music, and slow movement, while annoying, didn’t particularly bother me.
Vasily Zotov released his magnum opus, Quite Soulless, about a year ago as shareware, but this game is free. You can view the trailer here and play the game online or offline here.
Hit the jump for an interview with the creator, Vasily Zotov:
Au Sable is a game by the maker of All of Our Friends Are Dead, Amon26, and appears to be at least a spiritual sequel to that game. Fans of the previous game might enjoy the new one. For those who didn’t play that one, they are both platformers which focus on delivering dark and creepy feelings.
There’s more variety than the first game, and the controls feel tighter, and the art is just as nice. My only complaint is that the mouse cursor is off by default and the only way to learn how to turn it on is in the ReadMe file (which I missed and played through the game with that difficulty).
Again, you can get a taste of the game from Ortoslon’s playthrough if you’re sleepy or unconvinced by this review.
Small Worlds is an exploration game in which, as you explore, the world gradually zooms out and is revealed. It is quite short and charming, even though there’s no enemies, upgrades, collectibles, or actions besides moving and jumping.
For those too tired to play through it, here’s Ortoslon’s playthrough (warning, spoilers).
Fatale is the latest mystical experiment from Tale of Tales. It’s inspired by Oscar Wilde’s interpretation of the biblical character Salome, although, in my opinion, knowledge of the story is not required to enjoy the game. I wasn’t familiar with it before I played.
I think the game captures the spirit of the story very well. I don’t think it’s meant to retell the story, per se, but to give it a certain added richness by letting you explore a few of the critical scenes in interesting ways. It’s worth mentioning that Takayoshi Sato (of Silent Hill fame) did the character design, which is perfect considering the sensual and macabre nature of Salome’s tale. Overall, the graphics and audio are quite good.
I enjoyed Fatale and came out of it thinking about its implications and intrigued by its source material. However, I still feel that it’s a good game that’s shy of great. For it to be great would require more detail in the simulation, which sometimes feels clunky and uninspired. Whereas these flaws might go unnoticed in the games of “seasoned gamers” (a phrase playfully cribbed from the website), in Fatale they really stand out for the simple fact that looking around and taking in the environment is the game’s primary focus.
“Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the player’s computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the player’s ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.”
Created by Zach Gage. Nope, I haven’t tried it! (By the way, this is not one of the “great playable games” I mentioned in the last post.)
Time Donkey, the latest game from Flashbang Studios (and the 9th on Blurst!), has been released. In the game you play as a donkey working at a fast food joint who discovers a portal and becomes "trapped in the very fabric of time itself, doomed to relive the same 30 seconds again and again."
It mostly plays like your standard 3D platformer -- running, jumping, collecting tacos -- but the trick here is that you can press R to jump back in time and try again, while "ghosts" of your previous tries play out. You can then interact with them, allowing you to reach new areas and such. It's a bit overwhelming at first, but once you get a handle on the controls and start planning your moves, it's quite fun. (And pretty darn hilarious!)
The music is, of course, by the indefatigable Danny B.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:52:00 GMT
GearToyGear is a new crazy-fast tunnel shooter from shmup deity Kenta Cho. The instructions are: “Avoid incoming bullets/lasers/obstacles and destroy enemies. Hold the right trigger to speed up and earn more score.” It might be prudent to add a seizure warning as well.
Tanaka’s Friendly Adventure is a sweet game from ‘bento_smile’. The basic premise is that you have four directions to travel in, and any combination of directions will cause friends to appear on the grasslands around Tanaka. At the end of each play, Tanaka takes these characters to a Party Room, where you can see which ones you’ve met and some extra information about them. Paulo for instance is a dog who enjoys both laundry and that most delectable of snacks; The Eccles Cake.
There isn’t much more to it than that, and there really doesn’t need to be. The friends are reason enough to search for them, each one being an eccentric character filled with a suprising amount of charm for such minor development. Think of it as a petting zoo for pixels, perhaps..
An interesting, and especially brave, first game. I’m sure it’ll meet some criticism for being very simplistic, but I think it’s a solid foundation for some great things.
If there is one game type that I love, it’s a free-roaming space sim. Games like Elite or Freelancer come to mind, where the player has the freedom to explore a universe unbounded, to etch out a living through trading, piracy, transportation, and even mining asteroid fields.
As much as I enjoy playing the miner route in these games, the experiences is hardly ever more than a 3D Asteroids clone, where you continually shoot spinning rocks into smaller and smaller chunks. I always wanted a game with a more detailed mining simulation; similar to the suddenly popular games Infiniminer or Minecraft.
Seems like Miner Wars is gonna be my kind of game.
Inspired by games like 1991’s Tunneler, where players dug tunnels to infiltrate their enemies base, and Descent, where they flew spaceships through cramped tunnels, Miner Wars allows players to dig their way through massive asteroids in an effort to uncover precious ores and investigate alien artifacts.
Don’t be afraid you’ll roam the stars alone though, Miner Wars is an MMO. Players will be able to join guilds and work together. Will your team mine ore from the kilometer-wide asteroids? or perhaps you will lie in ambush and snatch the ore out of the hands of another hard-working miner. You are free to make your living as you please, and there is a main plot to entertain you along the way, which will evolve with future game updates.
I talked briefly with Marek Rosa, Miner Wars Game Director, about this interesting project. “The player has several factions to choose from, and this choice determines who is his friend or enemy,” explains Rosa. “This faction’s bases also act as respawn locations for the player, and he can return to these bases to upgrade his ship with new weapons, engines, shields, etc.” I was told that currently there are ten ship-types for the player to choose from, varying in things like size, cargo capacity, armaments and power.
The factions also provide NPCs for the players to interact with, and Rosa gave a few examples of missions the player might receive, “It may be rescue, fighting, exploration, mining and harvesting ore, patrolling space, stealth missions or something else entirely.” Fighting will no doubt occur between players, and faction control of various sections of asteroid field will likely be one of the driving forces in the evolution of the game’s universe. “If you dig a tunnel, and the leave and go across the universe, another player can still come across your tunnel,” said Rosa. Every interaction you have with the physical world of the game will leave a permanent effect.
Although Miner Wars has an infinite world, with asteroid fields scattered forever in every direction, players don’t need to worry about flying for hours just to complete a mission. Rosa explained that players can travel instantaneously between various ‘transportation ships,’ which will be spread throughout the game’s universe. That’s not to say that players can’t strike out on their own though, and explore the places between these transport hubs. In fact, it’s this kind of exploration that will allow the player to discover alien artifacts among the asteroids, which can be collected and sold for a high profit.
The current distribution plan for Miner Wars is a release for PC in August, with updates and expansions of the game’s story and world expected to come every few months. Shortly after the PC release, it’s planned that Miner Wars will be coming to XBLA, and there are even whisperings of a 2D version headed to handheld devices like iPhone…
Nanosmiles has been long overdue for a review on TIGSource, especially since Dong was considerate enough to have it translated by Siiseli from Japanese into English for us. The game pits the player against microbes in an arena shmup with a twist: the unarmed player must collect and guide attack units in order to clear each level of enemies. This gives Nanosmiles a blend of direct and indirect control, and it helped to generate enough innovation within the game for it to have been showcased in last year’s Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show. (In case you didn’t know, the deadline for SOWN 2009 is August 16, and there is no entry fee.)
Overall, Nanosmiles is a well rounded game with enough levels to explore the basics of its gameplay and a challenging final level to cap the experience. The darting nature of the directional controls can be annoying at times, but it’s also fitting.
Edit: Dong recently updated EngRish Games with a post about Exelinya Burst, which is a cartoony Every Extend variant with a grappling claw that is now in English.
